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Lot Essay
We are grateful to both Professor Nicola Spinosa and Professor Riccardo Lattuada for independently proposing the attribution for this hitherto unpublished work to Giovan Battista Beinaschi.
Originally from Turin, where he studied under the court painter Esprit Grandjean, Beinaschi had settled in Rome by 1652. There, he worked initially for the engraver Pietro del Pò, for whom he made copies after Carracci's frescoes in the Galleria Farnese and Lanfranco's work in San Andrea della Valle and San Carlo Catinari. Lanfranco, in particular, was to have a lasting influence on Beinaschi's style. In 1664, he moved to Naples to work primarily in fresco on a series of different schemes for the churches of various religious orders within the city: San Nicola alla Dogana (1664; now destroyed); Santa Maria degli Angeli (1672-3); Santa Maria di Loreto; the Gesü Nuovo and the Santa Maria la Nova (all 1670s). Spinosa and Lattuada both place the present work firmly within Beinaschi's Neapolitan period, the latter deeming it one of his most accomplished easel pictures. While the picture reveals Beinaschi's enthusiasm and understanding of the baroque illusionism of Lanfranco, it also shows a pronounced response to the drama and theatricality of Mattia Preti, whose painting came to influence Beinaschi in the second half of the 1670s; see for example his Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus (Museo Duomo, Naples) and his paintings for the chapel of San Giacomo della Marca in Santa Maria la Nova. Indeed, Preti's own treatments of this subject are not unrelated to the present composition and may have directly inspired it (see, for example, Preti's picture datable to the 1630s in the Galleria di Palazzo Rosso, Genoa and a later work from the 1670s in the National Museum of Fine Arts, Valetta).
Originally from Turin, where he studied under the court painter Esprit Grandjean, Beinaschi had settled in Rome by 1652. There, he worked initially for the engraver Pietro del Pò, for whom he made copies after Carracci's frescoes in the Galleria Farnese and Lanfranco's work in San Andrea della Valle and San Carlo Catinari. Lanfranco, in particular, was to have a lasting influence on Beinaschi's style. In 1664, he moved to Naples to work primarily in fresco on a series of different schemes for the churches of various religious orders within the city: San Nicola alla Dogana (1664; now destroyed); Santa Maria degli Angeli (1672-3); Santa Maria di Loreto; the Gesü Nuovo and the Santa Maria la Nova (all 1670s). Spinosa and Lattuada both place the present work firmly within Beinaschi's Neapolitan period, the latter deeming it one of his most accomplished easel pictures. While the picture reveals Beinaschi's enthusiasm and understanding of the baroque illusionism of Lanfranco, it also shows a pronounced response to the drama and theatricality of Mattia Preti, whose painting came to influence Beinaschi in the second half of the 1670s; see for example his Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus (Museo Duomo, Naples) and his paintings for the chapel of San Giacomo della Marca in Santa Maria la Nova. Indeed, Preti's own treatments of this subject are not unrelated to the present composition and may have directly inspired it (see, for example, Preti's picture datable to the 1630s in the Galleria di Palazzo Rosso, Genoa and a later work from the 1670s in the National Museum of Fine Arts, Valetta).